When the genre of the medieval Icelandic saga emerged out of the confluence of Latin learned
prose and vernacular oral traditions during the course of the late twelfth and thirteenth
centuries a novel form of prosimetrum was crafted. In The Creativity Paradox: Verse Quotation
in the Íslendingasögur Judy Quinn explores the creative ways in which narrators of the Sagas of
Icelanders exploited traditional oral art forms within the still fledgling literary genre of
the prose saga. The juxtaposition of the convergent flow of prose narration with the divergent
mode of poetic recitation by saga figures is to some degree the aesthetic hallmark of the saga
form inventively explored by different authors scattered across the island and across decades
- and indeed centuries - as the corpus of Íslendingasögur was amassed. Because the complexity
of dróttkvætt utterance is often at odds with the linear narrative mode of prose a variety of
paradoxes can arise: of contradiction of discontinuity and of redundancy and excess. Moreover
once the richly divergent nature of skaldic composition is embedded in prose the divergent
energies of the stanzas alter the rhythm of narration and create discursive entanglements of
various kinds. It is out of the resultant trope of paradox that the particular creativity of
saga narration in the Íslendingasögur can be located in the innovative merging of two
conventions the learned mode of prose narration with the traditional oral mode of poetic
composition and performance. As saga authors pioneered a new literary genre the capabilities
of each form - of prose narration and of the quoted skaldic stanza - were explored and literary
synergies were created.
